Blue wall at University of Derby

I was in Derby most of this week for my third three day on site study block as part of my MSc Behaviour Change course. The course is great, but the University doesn't have a Students' Union bar! Are union bars not a thing anymore?

• As part of the onsite I had a taster workshop on Motivational Interviewing. This is something I first came across in How Minds Change by David McRaney and I was pretty excited for it. A taster was never going to be enough but I took away some new ways of thinking about parenting and in particular approaches around giving feedback.
• The study block also built on some of the thinking from the UN's Behavioural Science week last week. There's some methodology emerging for me that weaves together systems thinking, behaviour change, futures, and strategic design together. I made an earlier attempt at this (and talked about it here), but something else is brewing.
• It also struck me that a lot of behaviour change studies don't take into account the creative idea in their evaluation of an intervention. An intervention might, for example, use a poster campaign with persuasive messages around loss aversion to change behaviour. But I was thinking about Martin Wiegel's succinct reminder: "You can be relevant as hell and still be boring as fuck." If no one looks at your poster, they're not going to be persuaded by your message.
• I finished listening to Cultures of Growth by Mary C Murphy. It's not going to change your life, but there's some good tidbits in there. Her framing of mindset triggers that might move you into a fixed mindset or a growth mindset is really nice and there are some good strategies for moving from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset when you experience these things. The triggers are:
  • Mindset Microcultures
  • Evaluative Situations
  • High-effort Situations
  • Critical Feedback
  • Success of Others
• I tweaked my glute medius when running the other night in an fantastic display of cognitive bias. Despite my legs feeling done (qualitative data), I gave more weight to my quantitative "Recovery Score" (numbers!) which said I should crack on with a workout. Which is, of course, what I'd already decided to do. Now the literal pain in my arse is a reminder that knowing about cognitive biases won't save you. Process and talking to other people will.